WGPC – Colour Temperature: Warm, Cool, and Everything In Between
After asking what colour is, the next question is more practical: why does the same scene sometimes look warm and inviting, and at other times cold or lifeless?
The answer lies largely in colour temperature.
What Is Colour Temperature?
Colour temperature describes the colour of light, not the colour of objects. It is measured in degrees Kelvin (K), but you don’t need to worry about numbers to understand the idea.
Warm light contains more red and yellow tones. Cool light contains more blue. Candlelight, household lamps, and sunsets are warm. Open shade, overcast skies, and north-facing rooms are cool.
Our brains are very good at adapting to these changes, which is why a white sheet of paper usually looks white whether you’re indoors or outside. Cameras, however, have to be told how to interpret the light—and sometimes they guess wrong.
Sunsets and Sunrises – When “Wrong” Is Right
Sunsets and sunrises are a familiar favourite in the WGPC folder. This is also where colour temperature becomes most obvious.
If you leave your camera on automatic white balance, it may try to neutralise the warm light—cooling the scene and removing exactly the atmosphere that made you take the photograph. The result can look pale, grey, or underwhelming compared to what you remember.
Allowing warmth to remain—or even gently enhancing it—often produces an image that feels closer to the experience of being there, even if it is technically “less accurate”.
This is an early lesson in creative colour: emotional truth can matter more than technical correctness.
Interiors – Mixed Messages
Interiors are notoriously difficult. A single room might contain warm tungsten light, cooler daylight from a window, and perhaps LED lighting with its own colour cast. Your camera can only choose one interpretation.
Auto white balance often produces a compromise that satisfies none of the light sources. Walls may look yellow, shadows green, and daylight areas unnaturally blue.
In these situations, choosing a colour temperature that suits the subject rather than the room can transform the image. A slightly warmer balance can make a room feel welcoming. A cooler balance can emphasise cleanliness, calm, or early-morning stillness.
Again, there is no single “correct” choice—only intentional ones.
Colour Temperature and Black & White
It’s tempting to think colour temperature doesn’t matter once you convert to black and white. In fact, it matters a great deal.
Colour temperature influences the relative brightness of colours before conversion. A warmer image may produce lighter skin tones and darker skies in monochrome. A cooler image can emphasise texture, separation, or drama.
If you’ve ever wondered why two black and white conversions of the same image feel different, colour temperature is often part of the answer—even if you never see the colour itself.
Taking Control
Modern cameras and editing software give us simple tools to control colour temperature, usually labelled “Temp” and “Tint”. Small adjustments can have a surprisingly large effect on mood.
Rather than asking “is this right?”, try asking:
Does this feel like the light I experienced?
Does this support the subject?
Does this help the image say what I want it to say?
Once you stop chasing neutral colour, colour temperature becomes one of the most powerful expressive tools in photography.
Next week, we’ll look more closely at tint and why cameras often struggle with greens and magentas—especially in mixed lighting—and how a small adjustment can make an image suddenly fall into place.